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Pulling the ‘parent trigger’ again
A group of concerned parents mutinied against Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto, Calif., earlier this month, invoking their rights granted by California’s “parent trigger” law to demand change in their children’s school.
With just 35 percent of pupils proficient in reading and 46 percent proficient in math, the K-6 school is the worst school in its district and in the bottom 10 percent of the entire state. Parents felt frustrated with the lack of improvement in the school and decided to take matters into their own hands, forming the Desert Trails Parent Union.
With the help of Parent Revolution, an organization that partners with parents to make changes at underperforming schools, the Desert Trails Parent Union used the 2010 parent trigger law. The law states that if a school falls short of Adequate Yearly Progress requirements for four consecutive years, parents can petition for reform (see WORLD California’s “Parents push for change in LAUSD“). With the signatures of 51 percent of the school’s parents, parents can demand four courses of action, from converting the school to an independent charter school to simpler requests like changes in staff or updated facilities.
The group gathered the signatures of 70 percent of Desert Trails parents and submitted a petition to district demanding smaller class sizes, cleaner bathrooms, more classroom computers, and a wider curriculum that includes better science, art, history, and physical education classes.
The district has 40 days to respond to the petition in a way that satisfies the parents. “Either they work with us, or they let us turn it into a community charter school,” said Doreen Diaz, organizer of the Desert Trails Parent Union.
David Mobley, the principal at Desert Trails, said that some of the demands will not be feasible due to budget constraints and teacher union contracts, but he will work with parents, as his own vision for the school matches theirs: “Their long-term goals are very much what we want to do. The goals are similar at the end, but they want to go through a different process.” … MORE >>
back to top13 Comments to “Pulling the ‘parent trigger’ again”
As suggested, the problem is likely to need M-O-N-E-Y.
I wonder if those same parents are willing to band together to support bond issuance, levies, increases in real estate taxes or whatever it takes to be sure the schools can attract and hold the best teachers.
Otherwise they are spitting into the wind.
Just this week our local paper has been running a series of articles on RIF’s of numerous teachers in one county.
While it may be less true of government than other areas, generally in this world you get what you pay for. And you have your choice between the big screen TV/vacation trip to Cabo/stunning little black dress and the education of your children.
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My own experience as a private school teacher is that parent involvement is the biggest determiner in education. A petition drive is a very low level of involvement. Are these parents willing to make their kids do homework, to monitor student grades using the school’s online tools, to meet with teachers when students fall behind, and to make use of tutors and other extra-help resources?
Teachers are a convenient scapegoat. Surely there are some bad teachers, but many (I daresay most) work very long hours and pour their lives into their students. Doing this for poorly raised kids who can’t be made to care can be heartbreaking.
It bothers me that teachers have become a favorite punching bag of the Right.
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“As suggested, the problem is likely to need M-O-N-E-Y.”
Oh yeah… there’s no problem anywhere that can’t be solved by throwing money at it…
Unless it’s an established bureaucracy, then it’s just good money thrown after bad.
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I am sure the problem starts with money. Adelanto is a bizarre community that used to be just a main street and a few houses out in the Mojave Desert. Huge housing tracks were built there during the heyday of home ownership with little down and loans that should never have qualified. Folks moved out there from urban areas looking for bigger and better. After the housing collapse Adelanto has become a bit of a ghost town, a poster child for all that was wrong in real estate markets. I am sure the problem begins with a tax base that nose-dived.
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Arcadia, the tuition for my son’s private school is less than half of what they spend per student for the state and a third of the national average. What are they doing with all that money?
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Arcadia, you do understand that it is a poor neighborhood? I thought that you were in favor of providing for the poor. They shouldn’t have to pay for the improvements themsleves.
It’s not really the money. It’s the methodology! My wife and I can, and have, taught at home for betweeen $200 and $500 per kid and had them succeed much better than the average public school kid. My son is now in a public high school and finds it “easy.”
Obviously a public school has a lot more overhead, but my point is only that a teacher can teach excellently well without lots of fancy gadgets or brand new books or a higher salary. They can certainly teach well without a host of administrative and secretarial staff in the office.
One of the parents demands is cleaner bathrooms. You don’t need extra money for that. Assuming that there is already a janitorial staff, make them do their job or replace them. Having clean bathrooms in the school seems like a bare minimum service that the school should be providing for the money that they are receiving.
Another demand is a wider curriculum. That’s easy. Fire one of the assistants to the assistant and hire a classroom teacher in her place. Most public schools are extremely bloated on the top end of the personnel pool.
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“The group gathered the signatures of 70 percent of Desert Trails parents and submitted a petition to district demanding smaller class sizes, cleaner bathrooms, more classroom computers, and a wider curriculum that includes better science, art, history, and physical education classes.”
Pretty much nothing in the list will improve things. Smaller class sizes could if the current ones exceed 30 or 40 students per teacher. Cleaner bathrooms? Computer don’t help. A wider curriculum in those subjects for K-6, not kidding apparently.
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I know one way they could save. Make the Kids clean the bathrooms themselves.
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Bathrooms
I taught at a school that replaced all the fixtures in one boys bathroom with stainless steel urinals, toilets and sinks. The middle schoolers kept destroying them.
One time all the stall doors in one girls bathroom got replaced with new marble ones. Half an hour later, one one them had been broken.
Dirty bathrooms are the students problem, not the janitor, not the school.
One time I walked in the 8th grade boys bathroom. A boy was playing “Fire Hose” peeing all over the wall and floor…
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So, more parents around would help. Back in the far dark ages when I went to school, parents were the librarians and monitored the hallways. They sold hotdogs the one day we got a hot meal.
I spent 25 years of my life hanging around and helping as a parent aide. Sometimes I did valuable work, sometimes I just read to kids (which may have been valuable work), other times I shelved books in the library.
My mother, a public school teacher, used to say you get out of your education what you put into it. It’s amazing what can be accomplished if you stay simple: reading, writing and math, use the manipulatives and remember it’s often the simplest, least expensive things that really make a difference in a kid’s life.
Don’t get me started on the mismanaged money in the CA school system K-PhD.
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Bob — our middle school bathroom is in constant state of repair. Many kids simply refuse to use it and go to the junior bathroom and i don’t blame them.
Michelle and JFF are both right
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35% proficient in reading? Let me guess, they’re using a look-say approach labeled as whole language instead of a very systematic phonics curriculum. Easy fix. A different approach along with switching the curriculum for the same price would solve it. If they had selected the better method to begin with it would have cost even less.
My next door neighbor wanted me to evaluate her son’s reading problem. He had, unfortunately, been educated in CA in Silicon Valley until he was 12 and they moved here. He was 13 when she asked for my help. He had no idea that letters in combinations made specific sounds. He would look at the word “house” and guess “home”, “hound”, “hose”. He had been taught to look at a flashcard of the word as someone told him what the word said in hopes that he would memorize it. No wonder he couldn’t read.I’ve witnessed this approach being used in my local public library and it took all my self-control to not explain to the mother that what she was doing with her son was completely useless and she should return those flashcards to the teacher and withdraw her son.
What had the neighbor kid’s teachers in CA done to help him? They sent him to the counselor (during class time) so he could learn to not take the taunting of his classmates personally.
I gave his mother simple, easy to follow, phonics materials for her to work with him. She like didn’t have the time, what with all her personal training for her half marathons ya know, but like wanted to know if I would do it in my spare time.
And the math? Let me guess; it’s a lot of worksheets with very little hands-on application in concrete from. No visual representations in diagrams or 3 dimensional forms that represent the mental process in the early years. Exposure, rather than mastery, is the norm in their school. (That means that teachers will pass a child getting less than 95% of the problems right which is a recipe for serious problems later.) Memorization of basic math facts is not emphasized in the early years. There is a reason Asian curriculum and concrete teaching methods are so popular among the homeschooling crowd-they DO emphasize those things.
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With the performance of the school and the parent sentiment against it, it would be a good bet that there are a lot of problems at the school.
Kyle, like you we homeschooled our children. Two of them, midway through high school, began attending the local Jr college because it was much easier. We gave them dual credit to finish their high school.
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